Pros and Cons of Building a House Addition

Whenever interest rates fall and home equity loans become affordable, a hammer and saw orchestra is born all over the country. This is the sound of workers frantically building house extensions. A home addition is the single most expensive home renovation purchase that a homeowner will ever make. It is usually the only time a homeowner will write a six-digit check for a project. Unlike interior paint or landscaping work, adding a home is a project that cannot be undone. So it’s worthwhile to carefully consider this process, which can be alternatively rewarding and taxing, from all angles before you write that first check to the contractor.

Home Addition Pros 

Home Additions are all Your Creation

You may have an old house that was originally created by a builder and then changed over the years by other homeowners. When installing new floors, painting walls, or bathroom renovation, you are only adding to your unique touch of this collage.

But a home addition is a space that you can legitimately show as your creation. Building an add-on is like designing a brand new home without the expense of a brand new home. Some remodeling projects are just as exciting and creative as working with the blank slab that extra construction offers.

Additions outweigh other ways of adding space

When looking at different ways to add space to your home, no other method of creating space matches the addition of home in terms of financial and emotional value.

Sun salons are poor investments as later buyers may view them more as obligations to be broken than as quality space. If you decide to invest six figures in a fully air-conditioned sunroom, you can also build what you really want, an indoor addition.

Finished basements are applicable spaces for living and entertaining. But if you do not have a daylight basement, where one side is ground level or almost so, basements can be gloomy places with little or no windows. Plus, you are no longer adding any square footage to your home.

Room extras can best be described as mini home extras. These are an addition but are just one room, not multiple. Real home extras include many rooms. While room extras are your best option to save costs on home extras, they still come at a significant financial cost and disrupt your privacy.

Great High Cost-Value Ratio

According to the Home Counselor’s True Cost Guide, at least 65% of the cost of a mid-level two-story addition can be covered at the time of sale. 1 The key phrase, “can be recovered”, means that there is no way to predict the real estate market years ago. It is typically cheaper to build an addition than to buy a new home that equals the space of your existing home plus an addition. At the very least, the closing costs involved in selling your old home and buying a new home will push this option to the top.

Home Addition Cons

Higher Resale Price Not Guaranteed

As peripheral costs increase, you can still lose money when you decide to sell your home. More space inside the addition means higher heating and cooling costs, more windows to wash and gutters to clean, increased property taxes, and more homes to clean.

Although supplements offer the potential for higher cost-effectiveness ratios than other renovation projects, you still cannot recoup the full cost of the supplement when you sell. It is a gamble made by many homeowners. Building an add-on with the full knowledge that you will sell the house within a year or two usually means losing money, unless you are in a particularly hot real estate market.

House Additions Use up Property Space

If you do not add a second story, you will lose yard space by building an add-on. Once you build the home addition to ground level, this is space that can never be recovered.

If you have young children and you like them to play outside, you may want to stop the addition until they are mature or no longer care about outdoor play. The trend towards smaller and smaller yards continues as mammoth-sized houses cover a lot. In some communities, a backlash against houses eroding yards and additions has provoked calls for changes in zoning and permitting.

Addition Building Is Emotionally Taxing

In the early days of building a supplement, it can be exciting. At first, you can hardly wait for the workers to show up. They may not seem to be arriving fast enough.

Then one Saturday you wake up early to the sound of a gas generator five feet from your bedroom window and realize that your romance with building construction has hit the cliffs. Worse than that, your relationship with your spouse or partner can be hit on the rock. Many causes contribute to this, some of which are: having work teams in your home six days a week; noise and dust; who deal constantly with the contractor and not with each other; lack of privacy; and that end-stressful relationship, money worries.